On Consciencious Objection and Moral Injury

We have this tragic misperception that humanity is predisposed to violence.

The truth is that humanity is predisposed to peace. The default
position for humanity is that of conscientious objector to war and violence.

In our work at the Center
on Conscience & War, this is proven to us daily, through our individual
conscientious objectors. Science
has proven it, too. This tendency for cooperation over competition is evident
in daily life: on an average day, most people will witness countless acts of
cooperation, kindness, and humanity towards one another, and not one act of
violence or competition. And most of it is so commonplace, we barely even notice
it. We take our nonviolence for granted.

And so does the news. What makes the news is violence, not cooperation.
Particularly, on our local news programs, the top stories are the ones that
depict street crimes and “home invasions.” Seeing this interpersonal violence,
I am convinced, leads us to believe that people are predisposed to acting violently
toward one another. We
all make decisions based on patterns we observe, and if the patterns we
observe are highlighting violence, we are going to decide that humanity is violent.

How does this relate to war? If we believe that violence among humans
is natural, we will believe that war is inevitable.

But violence is not natural. Our conscience tells us killing another
human being is wrong. And it is the military that knows this better than anyone.

The military has taken notice that, over time, and through the history
of war, the vast majority of individuals refuse to shoot to kill. That means,
instead of firing directly at an “enemy,” soldiers (used here to cover all members
of the Armed Forces: soldiers, Marines, airmen and women, and sailors) would
fire their weapons away from their “targets,” or pretend to shoot. One investigation
found – and these studies
have been replicated
– that in World War I only about 5% of people shot to kill; in World War II,
about 15% of people shot to kill. By
the US war in Vietnam, the rate at which soldiers were shooting to kill
was found to be 90%. Today, that number could be even higher.

What happened? Training evolved to meet the military’s goals.

There is a science of teaching soldiers to kill and it is
called killology.
It is the science of circumventing the conscience.

In order to get an otherwise psychologically healthy individual to
kill, US military training has been developed to bypass the conscience and have
the act of killing – the act of firing one’s weapon with the intent to kill
– become reflexive.

Our conscience knows that taking another human life is wrong. We
don’t want to do it; we know that it is the worst possible thing we could do.
So the training has been developed to teach a soldier to kill without thinking,
without filtering through the conscience.

When we take the time to think – to filter through the conscience
– we make better decisions. And in the case of war and killing, the vast majority
of us already have decided.

In fact, 99% of us have decided by default that we will not chose
to kill. The military comprises less than 1% of the total US population. When
you add veterans to that number, it still only creeps up to 7%, and some of
them, of course, had been drafted; they didn’t volunteer to join the military.
And did volunteers join the military with a desire to kill, or for some other
purpose?

In my experience, talking as I do to members of the military everyday,
people that volunteer hold a sincere desire to serve and protect and to do something
bigger than themselves. We call it “the service,” after all. The people who
join the military are some of the most beautiful, selfless, and loving people
you could know. Sure, there are some cynical and self-serving reasons we could
suggest for why people join the military, and there are real accounts of skinheads
and other racists who were enlisting during the US invasion of Iraq, but that’s
not the rule. By and large, today’s 1% joined the military out of a deep love
and affection for humanity, not because they want to be killers.

And they suffer consequences for the same reasons. It is the same
love for humanity and desire to serve, I believe, that causes them to experience
deep trauma once their conscience processes the results of what they’ve done,
the deaths and the pain they’ve been a part of. Military training dulls the
conscience, but not forever. Very likely, the conscience is going to come back.
We all can relate to that just through our normal experiences of life. If we
have an argument with someone we love and don’t handle ourselves well, it nags
at us. Our conscience tells us we’ve done something wrong.

Now, put that on the scale a million times greater: killing someone
or failing to prevent an egregious act in war. Even being trained to kill can
and does cause trauma because it is so foreign from what our instincts tell
us is right. This trauma, these wounds to the soul – moral injuries – are caused
by transgressions against the conscience.

Hundreds of thousands of veterans are struggling with this trauma,
which is different than the trauma that is experienced by a rape survivor or
a hijack survivor. It’s not characterized by the hyper-vigilance or fear for
one’s life that we see in those cases. Moral injury is an inner conflict. The
Marines did a study
in 2011 that revealed that much of the trauma the service members were experiencing
was about guilt and betrayal of conscience.

So, is humanity predisposed to violence? I don’t think so. We’ve
allowed ourselves to be deceived by not only the military industrial complex,
which profits from war, of course, but also by all the major pillars of our
society: our government, our schools, our media, and even our churches. They
all tell us that violence is human nature. Even the peace movement falls victim
to this myth. We think, “people who join the military are different from me.
They can kill. I can’t kill.” Well, what I’ve learned, and what the evidence
shows is that they can’t kill either – not without consequences.

Remember, veterans make up just 7% of the population, yet they represent
20%
of the suicides in this country. That’s a very telling and shameful number.

So what’s a soldier of conscience to do? Too often, soldiers in crisis
believe they have only two choices: violate their conscience or violate their
orders. Of the two, violating their orders is a piece of cake. Maybe they’ll
get court martialed, go to jail, get busted down in rank, lose some pay. Maybe
they’ll get kicked out with a bad discharge. That’s finite, that’s measurable,
it’s manageable by most people.

But the violation of the conscience? We are just beginning to understand
its consequences, and they can be immeasurable.

It’s important that people know there is a third option: conscientious
objection – a legal pathway through which one can apply for discharge by affirming
our natural predisposition for peace, by affirming the power of conscience.

Maria Santelli is Executive Director of the Center on Conscience
& War, a 75-year old organization founded to provide technical and community
support to conscientious objectors to war. Based in Washington, D.C., Santelli
has been working for peace and justice since 1996. Beverly Bell, Natalie
Miller, and Emily Simmons helped with this article.

Thought the brand Moral Injury would have to be rendered more harmless to the military itself to compete with how they already write-off their spiritually wounded (including e.g. knee-jerk drug prescriptions). E.g. one cause had been seeing leadership fail to act appropriately. You won't be suing Uncle Sam for that. And really there's the pain of watching the war enthusiast and the propaganda that created and sustains him.

In about 2111, or about a hundred years, TV cameras will catch a little green man throwing a rock at Mt. Rushmore. The world will watch aghast, and as they're watching the mountain will lift off and travel to The Moon. The President will then declare an Intergalactic War on Little Green Men (IWoLGM), and everyone will kinda half-know that in a few years there'll be one of those silly 'movements' running around saying the mountain had-to-have-been "wired" and "fueled" (seeing as that's how things normally "blast off" in their world)—as if we-attacked-ourselves and stuff. They'll pontificate in vain: everyone will know that the rock caused it, and that "we" will be bombing the ones productively so bombed over it.

And, to a normal brain who did care for his country, just watching the never-ending reflex will be morally injurious.

oxydol

We humans may be predisposed to peace, but Americans, though maybe predisposed to peace, have become infatuated with force and violence. Today I heard an interview with a high school football player who when asked about how he felt about an opposing team that his team was to play next, answered by saying, "They are the enemy and we will destroy them." Which seems to represent the American attitude toward anyone who could be a rival. We are conditioned to that attitude our whole life, We are led to believe the only important thing is to get that "win."

Michael Kenny

The "problem" with Americans is that they are a product of colonialism. Other colonial peoples are also agressive (Australians, white South Africans …). The colonists were Europe's misfits and rejects. They were frequently already violent elements before they went to the colonies. The inherent lawlessness and "every man for himself" ruthlessness of colonial life favoured people who were agressive and who didn't shy away from violence. The ordinary working of genetics and natural selection did the rest. Americans come accross as particularly violent simply because the US currently projects power accross the planet in a way no other post-colonial entity does.

NoMoreStupdid

Man is Self-Motivated (selfish) by nature. The poor bitch about the rich, but their behavior would be no different if rich. Science has proven each cell has and instinct (consciousness to survive) in a multi-cell being all cells in unison fight for survival of the entire being. That is not saying you are wrong, pioneer and colonies all had to survive before climbing the Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. Social need are not individual needs, but are created by man for the same reasons as individuals. And the Rub is those who use society, gun and government for their Advantage. Soldiers "do or die with no reason why". The could not teach me that. Reason is what makes man survive. And being force into war is the submission of those who do not understand reason or security.

NoMoreStupdid

America is driven by Stock Owner power of money and accumulation of wealth with 0 contribution to the economy. Social Media is fast track competing with this power by Social Engineering. I call Mob Rule for the same advantage as Stock owner do with cash. The public will is being over taken by elected Official representing the Power and Money and the Popular opinion pushed by Social Media and false poll of 300+- representing 153 as 51% of America. Mathematically impossible no matter how random of 150 or 3 people are selected.

The result a Coup D 'Tat of Democratic Representation form of Government. 2 parties more or less the same with 2 different Names Only.

Michael Kenny

Humanity is indeed predisposed to peace but refusing to fight is a workable option only if 100% of mankind practices it. That may well happen one day but I see no sign of it in the near future. In all animal species, fights are about food supply. That's normally a combination of land, the number of members of a given species inhabiting it and competition with other species inhabiting the same territory. If more animals are going after a food which is not enough to feed them all, they'll fight, both between species and within a species. Humans view "food supply" in a very complex way but they behave no differently from any other species when they perceive some vital part of that complex calculation to be threatened. Thus, for peace to reign all over the planet, the available resources have to match the number of living creatures seeking to live off them. I'm sure that could be calculated in theory, but making it work in practice would be a very different story. What is to be done, for example, if the numbers outrun the resources? Kill off the surplus? If we don't, we'll all die of hunger. But who has to go? And who decides who? Thus, the whole system of conscientious objection rests on the assumption that there will be very few conscientious objectors and the objectors are in fact taking unfair advantage of their fellow citizens, letting them do the fighting while they sit back and wait to have the fruits of victory served up to them. That's why conscientious objection is normally limited to religious grounds: in any other case, fraud is just too easy.